We flew on American Airlines just a couple weeks ago and, starting 12 hour before the flight, you can print out your boarding pass. We just went to curbside check-in and the sky cap gave us a new set of boarding passes and we walked right on. We didn't have to go to the desk. I believe that if we didn't have any luggage to check, we would have been fine with just what we printed from the internet. It was great!